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S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given the permission to do so or not. Yet, in the context of today's market-dependent societies, ‘to be a writer’ can no longer mean purely to perform the act of writing. For a laywo/man to enter the priesthood – the sacred world of writers – s/he must fulfill a number of unwritten conditions.
(Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism)Though her words pertain to twentieth-century writers, Trinh T. Minh-ha provides a useful starting point for this chapter's survey of some theoretical and practical issues that attend, and complicate, the various concepts of the ‘woman writer’ circulating in early modern Britain and in modern scholarship about that period. The name ‘Britain’ in this era signals, we need to remember, a highly contested political and geographical site: England's formal union with Scotland did not occur until 1707, with Ireland only in 1801, and in this era Scottish and Irish territories were being forcibly claimed (along with more distant territories across the Atlantic and the English Channel) by a crown that had annexed Wales only in 1536. In this period of British history many ‘unwritten conditions’ governed writing as a domain of (frequently disputed) cultural meanings and values.
Although critics have found La Deffence full of contradictions, they have not seen its conceptual and tonal shifts as defensive strategies reflecting Du Bellay’s ambivalence toward ancient literature. His filial piety conflicts with his desire to rival the ancients by achieving poetic greatness in the vernacular. His ambiguous theory of imitation shows the conflict between reverence and rivalry in its portrayal of imitation both as an organic process and as a violent power struggle in which the French poet devours or rapes ancient models. A similarly equivocal stance toward classical literary power appears in Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, which illuminate La Deffence by defining a state of exile in which the Renaissance poet is torn between past and future, Rome and France. In La Deffence, the exile’s voice emerges as a dialogue that expresses the paradoxical desire to be both like and unlike the great classical originals.
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